On Jan 22, 2008 12:46 PM, Alvah Whealton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Jan 21, 2008 6:06 PM, Brandon Van Every <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > With this kind of programming background, I don't see what the big > > deal about a text editor is. > > I was not at all gifted technically. I have learning disabilities > and always struggled for everything I got. But if one considers the > ability to appreciate the significance of things and to experience a > sense of wonder in things we encounter, I was perhaps blessed in that.
Ah, ok. I'm pretty impatient, I often let myself be bored by things too easily. > text > processing in conjunction with email enabled me to escape isolation, > and enabled me to make a number of significant and lasting friendships > throughout the world. The internet is cool! It's usually what I turn to when I'm bored. Half the time it's people that rejuvenate me. The other half of the time, information. Really it's quite a remarkable step in human evolution, to have so much access. > It is easy to lose sight of how many people are still marginalized > with respect to computers. The greater Linux community has the best > chance of guiding a lot of elderly people, disabled people, and poor > people to low cost computers, free software and a mentoring process > which reflects genuine community values. And I have to believe, from > my own experience, that what they stand to gain is not just a hobby > but something which offers a means of enhancing their lives. And so > much of it is built on text processing. Interesting proposition. I agree about the community values, and it seems people around here are willing to do the training. I see problems regarding documentation and ease of use. These are problems not just with Linux, but with Open Source generally. I see emacs and vi as instances of that problem. Scite is better but I wouldn't recommend it to a non-technical person. It's still a technical text editor, with most of the bells and whistles of emacs and vi. It's just a lot leaner and meaner. Word processing is an easier problem as it tends to connote WYSIWYG sensibilities anyway. Lately I'm using AbiWord. http://www.abisource.com/ It almost does what Word 2000 does, but currently it requires outlines for table boxes, it can't just render the contents of the boxes without an outline. The latter is how my resume is formatted, so I'm not free of Word 2000 yet. I think there are some forces in the Linux universe, such as Ubuntu and KDE, that are headed in the right direction regarding ease of use. They're just not quite there yet. Ubuntu and KDE cultures are rather different from emacs and vi cultures. > > Now, thanks to the internet, any kid with technical ability has access > > to HUGE resources. Techies are incredibly empowered, and the > > limitations are more systemic and cultural than technical. Text > > editing is now old hat. Lots of conventions exist for GUIs that have > > been pioneered by Apple and popularized by Microsoft. Lots of > > standard libraries to manipulate fonts are available. From this > > perspective, vi is a dinosaur that survives only because text shells > > are still used. > > I certainly don't mean this to be offensive, but I think that > perspective is a bit narrow. It allows for your creative needs, but it > does not necessarily address the creativity of others. I'd like to see the creativity of the vim community applied towards easier to use software. There's a lot of stuff out there that may be personally creative and empowering, but is technically repetitive. Some people are extreme in this regard. For instance, I have a friend who's autistic and rather gifted as far as his ability to sling raw code. But he's forever reinventing the wheel from scratch. He has seemingly no capacity to work with other people, build on what has come before him, or contribute new value to techiedom. He could contribute *in theory* but he never sticks with his self-invented works long enough to make them usable to anyone else. He never deals with problems according to what's easy for other people to use, only what works for him. So although I recognize his programming process is very useful to him personally - it's his psychological maintenance tool - sometimes I just want to pull my hair out about how generally useless it is to others. My autistic friend is an extreme instance of this. I see vim as a much lesser instance. People use vim, no doubt about that. But it is a limited audience. I think vi's popularity is driven mostly by the installed base, not technical merit. It takes a looooong time to retire a tool when it's got a huge critical mass behind it. For Integrated Development Environment work it has already happened though. People use Eclipse, people use KDevelop, people use all kinds of IDEs other than vim. People even use scite. The text editing problem is probably not important enough for anyone to do anything truly radical about it. Text editors will probably just float along and eventually they'll all achieve a parity of popularity, since they don't greatly matter. > Of course, > that is my opinion, only. For me, the Linux community is about > opening doors for creativity. It's about encouraging people to reach, > to explore and to experiment. It's about encouraging people to develop > and use their own judgments. It's about an OS that can accommodate > varying styles and approaches. Indeed, "I want thousands of options" is an endemmic problem in the Unix universe. Unix is very much a techie playground. That has its downsides: duplication of effort, less standardization, and not as much energy put into ease of use. "I want one option, or a few options, that work well" is much more characteristic of the Mac / Windows universe and it shows in the products. > But my feeling is that in smaller > segments of the community, like PLUG, there is much to be gained > through mentoring, and encouragement, and enormous amounts to be > gained from observing the "styles" of others, finding what makes them > tick and taking advantage of the opportunity to gain from their > knowledge. I find the acquisition of knowledge, whether about cutting > edge tools or arcane technology, to be a source for broadening my > mind, creating perspective and tantalizing my sense of wonder. That's cool. Most of my plans are about world conquest. :-) Which is the kind of impulse you need if you don't want to be shafted by Microsoft *and* you want to compete head to head with them, not just avoid them. > Creativity and achievement are always deserving of my respect. They > may or may not be reflected in the tools which are used, but in either > case they certainly transcend the tools. I would never look at your > achievement and assume I knew better than you what your creative needs > are. I would think that to be very disrespectful, and perhaps > condescending. Certainly you deserve better than that. I understand the sentiment, but when one has domain expertise, it's not possible to always think thus. I wouldn't be capable of designing good software if I wasn't willing to judge and dismiss various things. Is Microsoft a paragon of creativity and achievement? No it is not. I don't respect their corporate dynamics. They hire a lot of cynical people who mill around and make mediocre to bad products. Similarly, I don't respect the dynamics of particular technologies or efforts. For instance I don't have much positive to say about GNU Autoconf, and there are legions of people who pull their hair out about that. I'm in the "get rid of Autoconf, migrate to something better" business, that's how I make money. It's not just a mercenary proposition, it's an ideological commitment. I believe open source can and should do better from a technical design standpoint, and from a political standpoint, I tire of the FSF cutting its nose to spite its face. > Please take care, You also! Cheers, Brandon Van Every _______________________________________________ CMake mailing list CMake@cmake.org http://www.cmake.org/mailman/listinfo/cmake